Graeme Archer works as a statistician, and is a winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Blogging. He writes a column in Saturday's Daily Telegraph.

Nick Clegg once chased middle-class votes. Now he portrays us as snarling toffs

"No, you're wrong, it's fifty grand, I read it in the paper on the way down."

We tapped away on our iThings, in order to confirm the latest fiscal horror story. "Oh my god. She's right."

On high days and holidays, or just when we're really fed up, two friends (whom I'd better call "Helen" and "Mark", to spare their blushes – no living statisticians were harmed in the writing of this blog) and myself take a day off work and spend it at the seaside. Sometimes we spin ourselves around the roller coaster. Sometimes we race the mechanical dolphins on the pier. Always we walk along the seafront, chatting about work, about our families, about, you know, thank God we've got a day off.

On Monday – the day the rains came back – we were blown off the seafront, so took cover in a Costa. Helen unfurled her copy of Another Newspaper, decorated with a large photo of the Deputy Prime Minister, and started banging Nick Clegg's face off the table, punctuating her snarls about his latest suggestions, in a pre-conference interview, that taxes should increase on the "wealthy". That is, the "top 10 per cent", those who earn over £50,500: us. "I hate him. I hate him!"

It's easy, while everyone is lazily slipping back into Tory-posh-boys-vs-the-plebs stereotyping (like putting on an old pair of slippers) to forget Mr Clegg's problems with his middle-class vote, so determined is he to re-woo the Left.

No one wants to pay more tax. But the "top 10 per cent" already contribute 55 per cent of the total tax take, according to George Osborne. Do the Lib Dems really want to increase the fairness of this distribution?

In any case, Helen and Mark are losing their child benefit (and don't quibble with this); the salary at which we pay the top rate is eroded, year-on-year; we can't remember when we had a pay rise that took us above inflation. We spend our working hours worrying if we've done enough to hold onto our positions, and sleepless nights watching the ghosts of former colleagues flit behind our eyelids. None of us is "wealthy" – none of us would come close to paying Lib Dem mansion taxes, because we don't live in the sort of posh places southern Lib Dems represent. But we are all significantly worse off than we were before the coming of austerity, fiscally and psychologically.

But we're such easy targets: it seems aeons since politicians worked themselves into a lather about "the squeezed middle", the families who "do the right thing". We all work and nearly all of us pay all our taxes through PAYE. We weren't born to the right parents, and didn't go to the right schools, so none of us is going to head a quango or sit on the board of a blue chip. We've slipped from no.1 political priority (before the election, because we usually vote, and we usually vote Lib Dem or Tory) to, in Mr Clegg's party's eyes, it appears, public enemy number 1. The cash cows that keep on giving.

The only thing I've ever really wanted from a Chancellor was some sort of protection for my pension. Not a guaranteed pay-out, don't be silly, I'm not a trade union leader, or a GP – but a guarantee to stop fiddling around with the one benefit the state "gives" me, in allowing me to save my pre-tax income into a pension scheme, so that I can pray, every day for the next 30 years, that the City doesn't f— up endlessly, that the fund will eventually pay me enough to live on, once I'm able to retire, at around 75 (on current projections; neither the value of your fund at retirement nor its projected annuity rates are guaranteed, terms and conditions apply).

Far from guaranteeing that, all we get from the Lib Dems is this endless mood music about how we're still too rich and still not paying enough tax. That's why Mark's live-off income is nothing like Mr Clegg's wealthy level of £50,500. "I'm shoving as much into the pension fund as I can, before they ruin it."

The comfy slippers and those rosy cheeks. It's easier, much easier, to blame our problems on "them" – the wealthy – using lazy rhetoric to conflate middle-class Britons with the snarling toffs, who shake their pinstriped arms at the plebs; easier to do that at your party conference, than it is to work out how to flatten and lower taxes for everyone. Easier than to think like a liberal.

I'm a tribal Tory, so discount my dislike of the Lib Dems. But both Helen and Mark are exactly the sort of educated, middle-class professionals who used to swoon at the sight of the "reasonable" Liberal Democrat leader. Mr Clegg should pause, and consider this fact. On the very day his party was strutting its stuff on a Brighton stage, some two hundred yards away, in a dusty cafe, one of his erstwhile voters was repeatedly slapping his face's image on the table, snarling about how much she hated him; and another looked on and laughed.